A Company of Swans (8 page)

In this hotel, as in all the others where the dancers had stayed, Dubrov's room adjoined that of the ballerina, Galina Simonova. Since Simonova's views on "passion as an aid to the dance" were well-known, it might be concluded that Dubrov enjoyed what were technically known as conjugal rights, and this was so. Dubrov's rights, however, were granted to him on such uncertain terms—were so dependent on the state of Simonova's back, her Achilles tendon and her reviews—that he had learned to temper the wind to the shorn lamb in a way which was not unremarkable in a man who had once written a ninety-stanza poem in the style of Pushkin entitled Eros Proclaimed.

The evening of Harriet's arrival at the theater, he found Simonova lying on the sofa—an ominous sign-staring with black and tormented eyes at her left knee.

"It's going again, Sashka; I can feel it! Dimitri has given me a massage, but it's no use—it's going. We must cancel the tour!"

He came over to sit beside her and felt her knee, considerably more familiar to him than his own. "Let me see."

Her knee, her cervical vertebrae, the bursa on her Achilles tendon… he knew them like men know their children and now, as his stubby fingers moved gently over the joint, he wondered for the thousandth time why fate had linked him indissolubly with this temperamental, autocratic woman.

Sitting with balletomane friends in his box in the bel étage at the Maryinsky in St. Petersburg, he had picked her out of the corps. "That one," he had said, pointing at the row of water sprites in Ondine, and he was right. She became a coryphée, a soloist…

It was not difficult in those days to enjoy her favors; he was young and rich and could present her own image to her in the way that women have always found irresistible. "If you give me half an hour to explain away my face, I could seduce the Queen of France," said Voltaire—and Dubrov, though uninterested in royalty, could have said the same.

He bought her an apartment on the Fontanka Canal and she was moderately faithful for she was obsessed by dancing—by her career. Outside revolutions rumbled, Grand Dukes were assassinated and picked off the cobbled streets in splinters, but to Simonova it mattered only that she ended badly after her pique turns in Paquita or started her solo a bar too soon. And because it was this that he loved in her—this crazy obsession with the art that he too adored—he put up with it all, became manager, masseur, choreographer, nurse…

She rose steadily in the ranks of the Maryinsky. They gave her the Lilac Fairy, then Swanhilda in Coppélia and at last Giselle. After her first night in that immortal ballet, he watched one of the great cliches of the theater brought to life—the students unharnessing the horses from her carriage in order to pull her through the streets—but later she had cried in his arms because she had not got her fall right in the Mad Scene: it was clumsy, she said, and the timing was wrong.

A year later she threw it all away in a stupid, unnecessary row with the management, refusing to wear the costume they had designed for her in Aurora's Wedding and appearing instead in a costume she preferred. She was fined and told to change it. She refused. No one believed it would come to anything for the hierarchical, bureaucratic theater was full of such scenes, but Simonova with childish obstinacy forced the director to a confrontation and when she was overruled, she resigned. Resigned from the theater she adored, from the great tradition which had nourished her, and went to Europe. And Dubrov, too, exiled himself from his homeland, sold his interests in Russia and created a company in which she could dance.

Since then they had toured Paris and Rome, Berlin and Stockholm, and it was understood between them that she hated Russia, that she would not return even if they asked her to do so on bended knees. For eight years now they had been exiles and it was hard—finding theaters, getting together a corps, luring soloists from other companies. Of late, too, there had been competition from other and younger dancers—from Pavlova, who had also come to Europe; from the divine Karsavina, Diaghilev's darling, who with Nijinsky had taken the West by storm. Simonova owned to thirty-six, but she was almost forty and looked it: a stark woman with hooded eyes and deep lines etched between her autocratically arched brows.

"We should never have attempted this tour," she said now. "It's madness."

Fear again. It was fear, of course, that ailed her knee… fear of failure, of old age… of the new Polish dancer, Masha Repin, who had joined them three days earlier and was covering her Giselle…

"You have told them it is my farewell performance?" she demanded. "Positively my last one? You have put it on the posters?"

Dubrov sighed and abandoned her knee. This was the latest fantasy—that each of her performances was the last, that she would not have to submit her aging body to the endless torture of trying to achieve perfection anymore. He knew what was coming next and now, as she moved his hand firmly to her fifth vertebra, it came.

"Soon we shall give it all up, won't we, Sashka, and go and live in Cremorra? Soon…"

"Yes, dousha, yes."

"It will be so peaceful," she murmured, arching her back to give him better access. "We shall listen to the birds and have a goat and grow the best vegetables in Trentino. Won't it be wonderful?"

"Wonderful," agreed Dubrov dully.

Three years earlier, returning from a tour of the northern cities of Italy—in one of which a critic had dared to compare Simonova unfavorably with the great Legnani—the train that had been carrying them toward the Alps had come to a sudden stop. The day was exquisite; the air, as they lowered the window, like wine. Gentle-eyed cows with bells grazed in flower-filled fields, geraniums and petunias tumbled from the window-boxes of the little houses, a blue lake shimmered in the valley.

All of which would not have mattered except that across a meadow, beside a sparkling stream, one of the toy houses proclaimed itself "For Sale."

To this oldest of fantasies, that of finding from a passing train the house of one's dreams, Simonova instantly responded. She seized two hat-boxes and her dressing-case, issued a torrent of instructions to her dresser and pulled Dubrov down onto the platform.

Two days later the little house in Cremorra—complete with vegetable garden, grazing for a substantial number of goats, three fretwork balconies and a chicken-house—was his.

Fortunately, in Vienna the critics were kind and it was not too often that Simonova remembered the little wooden house which a kind peasant lady was looking after. They had spent a week there the year after he bought it and Dubrov had been rather ill, for there was a glut of apricots in their delightful orchard and Simonova had made a great deal of jam which did not set. Of late, however, Cremorra was getting closer and Dubrov, to whom the idea of living permanently in the country among inimical animals and loosening fruit was horrifying, now searched his mind for a diversion.

"I employed a new girl today," he said. "The one I told you about in Cambridge. Sonia's pupil. She ran away to come to us, so no doubt I shall be arrested soon for luring away a minor."

"Is she good?"

The fear again… but behind the panic of being overtaken, something else—the curiosity, the eagerness about the thing itself: the dance and its future.

"How could she be good? She is an amateur."

"But Sonia taught her, you say?" They had been friends of a sort, she and Sonia who, a few years older, was already in the corps when Simonova joined the company. Together, infuriated by the antics of a visiting "star," they had unloosed an ancient, wheezing pug-dog on to the stage during a ballet called Trees…

"Yes, but three times a week. Oh, you know how the British are about the arts—the gentility, the snobbery. It's a pity, for if they chose they could make marvelous dancers of their girls. Perhaps one day…"

"Why did you want her then?"

Dubrov, about to embark on the quality he had detected in Harriet—a totality and absorption—changed his mind. Simonova had started on a routine that was all too familiar—the lavish application of cold cream, the knee bandage, the wax ear-plugs to eliminate the noises of the traffic—which in about three minutes from now would result in his being chastely kissed on the forehead and dismissed.

"She has ears like Natasha's," he said.

The ballerina spun around. "Like Natasha's? In War and Peace? But Tolstoy doesn't describe her ears."

Dubrov shrugged. "I don't need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like."

It worked. The jealousy on her face was instantaneous and owed nothing to her profession. "You are an idiot." She put the ear-plugs back in the drawer, wiped off the cream with a piece of gauze.

"Chort!" she said. "I'm tired. Let's go to bed."

Harriet had always longed to be allowed to work. Now her wish was granted a hundredfold. There were constant disasters as this most unfledged of swans, this newest of snowflakes staggered across the stage. But though Harriet made mistakes, she did not make them twice.

The girls, without exception, were helpful. They themselves had only just learned to work in unison, but they counted for her, pushed her, pulled her and retrieved her from inhospitable corners of the stage. Even Olga Narukov—a spitfire from the borders of Afghanistan who thought nothing of felling a dancer who displeased her with a kick like a mule's—kept her temper with Harriet, for the newcomer's grit and humility were curiously disarming.

"Follow the girl in front!" Grisha yelled at Harriet when her musicality threatened to lead her astray. "Just follow the girl in front!"

The girl in front, when the corps was arranged by height, was the French girl Marie-Claude, and there could be no one more worthy of being followed.

The creation of brown-eyed blondes has long been regarded as one of God's better ideas. Marie-Claude's eyes were huge and velvety, her lashes like scimitars, her upturned mouth voluptuously curved. To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to his doom.

Marie-Claude, however, did not so choose. She was entirely faithful to her fiancé, a young chef who worked in an hotel in Montpellier, and though occasionally willing (if the price was right) to emerge from a sea-shell at the Trocadero or sit on a swing in some nightclub clad only in her hair, she did so strictly to earn money for the restaurant which she and Vincent, as soon as they had saved enough, were proposing to open in the hills above Nice.

It was Marie-Claude and the Swedish girl, Kirstin, who found space for Harriet in the tiny room they shared in a hostel in Gray's Inn Road. It was already crammed full with their two truckle-beds, but the good-natured warden put a mattress on the floor for Harriet. The confusion and clutter were indescribable but to Harriet—used to the solitude and icy hygiene of her bedroom in Scroope Terrace—everything was a delight.

From her new roommates Harriet learned a great deal about the Company. That the Russian girls were on summer leave from their dancing academies in Kiev and Odessa and would return to their native land in the autumn. That Simonova detested Maximov, who had once dropped her in the grand pas de deux at the end of Sleeping Beauty. That Masha Repin, the brilliant young Pole, was reputed to be sticking pins into a wax model of Simonova so that she could take over Giselle …

Neither of the girls was ambitious: of "the dance" they asked only that it give them a living, and the fabled city of Manaus might have been Newcastle or Turin: it was somewhere they could work and be paid.

"Though there is a great deal of money to be made out there," pointed out the practical Marie-Claude. "Vincent's cousin works as a chef to an important man in Rio and he sends back enormous sums to Montpellier."

Kirstin had been put to dancing by her father—a ballet master who worked in Scandinavia and London—and Marie-Claude by her half-English mother, an opera dancer who had been undulating between two camels in an open-air production of Aida when a young farmer from the Languedoc decided to remove and marry her. Though only two years older than Harriet, their attitude toward the English girl was that of two worldly and experienced aunts.

"It must be incredible, being so beautiful," said Harriet now, overawed by the sight of Marie-Claude in her shift preparing for bed.

"Not at all," said the French girl dismissively. "Until I met Vincent it was extremely disagreeable. From the age of six I had to go everywhere with a hat-pin—a very long one from my Tante Berthe's Sunday hat. Even so, it wasn't always so simple. For example, when I was fifteen there was an old gentleman who used to wait for me outside school and offer to give a thousand francs to the Red Cross if I would let him see me brush my hair. Obviously, simply to jab a hat-pin into such an old gentleman would not have been correct. It is, after all, a very good cause—the Red Cross. But now I have Vincent and everything is—." She broke off to look aghast at the voluminous flannel nightdress which Harriet was pulling over her head. " 'arriette, what is that that you have there?" she inquired, her excellent English fracturing under the shock.

"It's all I have," said Harriet ruefully. "My Aunt Louisa chose it."

Marie-Claude deliberated. "Perhaps if you undid the top button… and pushed up the sleeves, comme ça?"

"But I'm only going to bed."

Kirstin, who had been rubbing methylated spirit into her slender feet, pushed back her straight pale hair and exchanged a glance with Marie-Claude.

"Only?" said Marie-Claude, speaking for them both.

But long after the other two were asleep Harriet, the top button of her nightdress obediently undone, sat up on her mattress recalling the day. She had escaped but she was not yet safe; a knock at the door could mean a policeman, recapture and the misery of a life which, now she had tasted freedom, she felt she could not endure again. Yet presently she found her fingers involuntarily marking out the steps in the snowflake waltz they had gone through at the last rehearsal, using instinctively the curious shorthand—a kind of deaf-and-dumb language—that dancers employ… And waking at dawn, she rose and in the deserted dining room of the hostel, among the stacked chairs, she practiced.